MOTIONS

Ms MASCARENHAS (Swan) (18:40): Supernovas, black holes, galaxies far away—humans have been fascinated by the skies for millennia. When people think of space, they think of things like the moon landing, Star Wars and shooting stars—or maybe aliens. What often gets missed is the infrastructure on the ground that powers the satellites, the exploration and the discoveries.

It turns out that this infrastructure and technology is being used for a great deal more than exploring unknown corners of the universe. Advancements in the space sector have tangible effects on our everyday lives, from medical imaging in our hospitals to crop data helping our farmers. That's why strategy and investment in this sector matters.

The government's Statement on Space guides Australia's vision to strengthen our economy and national resilience by investing in a future made in Australia. It's about backing Australia's space industry to capture the growing opportunities of the global space economy and creating good Australian jobs at the same time. As the Minister for Industry and Innovation put it: We want to see more Australian ideas commercialised, more Australian technology deployed globally, and more of the economic value harnessed here at home.

This statement is intended as a practical framework for collaboration between industry, researchers, governments and international partners. A prime example of this collaboration in building Australian technology is the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, which is in my home of Swan. It's a partnership between CSIRO, Curtin and Murdoch universities, UWA and Edith Cowan University.

It has been serving more than 4,000 researchers across the country. They're involved with things as diverse as start-ups and supernovas. Pawsey was built to process the vast amounts of data generated by Australia's investment in radioastronomy.

In regional Western Australia sits the ASKAP, which is a part of the Square Kilometre Array project. It's a radio telescope that listens for radio waves coming from deep space—from galaxies, black holes and cosmic events that happened billions of light years away. Scanning the sky this way generates an enormous amount of raw information, far more than any single computer sitting next to the telescope could make sense of, and this is where the job of Pawsey comes in.

Pawsey has a supercomputer called Sentonix. It's the most powerful research computer in the Southern Hemisphere. It was delivered through government investment and has been ranked the fourth-greenest supercomputer in the world.

How cool is that? And talking about cooling, it is actually cooled by a CSIRO-developed groundwater system that returns what is used with no net loss of groundwater and no impact to the aquifer. This saves around seven million litres of water a year.

It runs on about 120 kilowatt hours of on-site solar. This is sovereign capability in practice, the kind of trusted service that Australians can rely on only by depending on system controls that aren't dependent on places elsewhere. Pawsey operates on a partnership model rather than a vendor arrangement.

The intellectual property generated on its systems belongs to researchers and institutions who use it, and the computing capacity is allocated on a merit basis, not sold to the highest bidder. Once again, this is such a smart process. Sovereign capability cannot simply mean assembling technology that was designed and owned somewhere else; it means Australian ideas—developed here, tested here and owned here.

And Pawsey has been doing that for well over a decade. It is infrastructure already operating in Kensington, and it goes far beyond space into everyday life here, also, on earth. In WA, that computing power has helped build a tool that can spot the signs of eye damage caused by diabetes just from taking a photo during a regular check-up.

This also means that a patient can be screened at their local GP without needing to see a specialist first. In the Wheatbelt, where Curtin University is doing some work, they have looked at the genome of the pathogen behind yellow spot disease. Every day, researchers and students in Swan are quietly doing work, looking into our space and helping improve the lives of everyday Australians.